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Word of the day : bruit : rumor, report; (usually used with about)

Just another hawt Sunday in the south. Julia and I (and Gabriel) went up to Augusta yesterday in order to take advantage of our favorite bookstore's great Buy 5-Get 5 Free sale.

Today, Gabriel is taking a nice long nap, I'm doing some yard work, and Julia's upstairs hard at work!

Book Reviews

R. Tripp Evans' 2010 biography of Grant Wood certainly proved to be illuminating. I knew next to nothing about Wood's life or art outside of American Gothic, and I thought Evans did a thorough, admirable job at taking the reader through Wood's childhood, influences, family life, teaching career, early work, fame, fall-out, and last years. It's accessible and never boring - Evans writes lucidly and gives informed, intelligent analyses of Wood's works. It doesn't take long, however, to realize that Evans has a bit of an agenda - although that may be too strong of a word. Something's up, though. Evans is awfully interested in Wood's covert homosexuality. The author can't seem to ignore it, almost going so far as to claim that homosexuality informed everything in Wood's life: his relationships with his friends and sister; the troubled marriage to his second wife; his fractured teaching career at the University of Iowa; his major works. I got a little tired of Evans' implications and one-note digging. So I would recommend this (if you are interested in Wood or American art of the 20th century), but with reservations. This is as much a Gay Studies book as it an art book.
(***)

This 2011 young adult thriller by prolific bestselling YA writer Todd Strasser delivers the goods. It works as a mystery and a suspenseful page-turner. A high school senior, Shelby, becomes the object of scorn at her school when her father, a well-regarded fashion photographer, is suspected in the disappearance of three young wannabe models. If her dad is innocent (and he appears to be guilty of something), then, Shelby reasons, that must mean that someone at her dad's office is behind it: Is it her dad's hunky, dreamboat assistant? The office manager with a questionable past? Someone from school possibly? Everyone is a suspect here, and it's to Strasser's credit that the red herrings don't pop up here so much as evolve naturally from Shelby's growing sense of confusion and uncertainty; you don't feel like the writer is jerking you around, goosing you. The subject matter gets admirably skeevy and dark, but it has a god twist ending. I think it would make a solid movie.
(****)

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The Italian Baroque painter Artemesia Gentileschi was born on this date in 1593. Born in Rome, Artemisia was the daughter of a painter. She trained under her father, who introduced her to some of the leading Roman artists of the day, including Caravaggio (whose chiaroscuro style influenced Artemesia). Artemesia never went to school; she didn't learn to read and write until she was an adult. Artemesia was the plaintiff in a seven-month long rape trial in 1612. Artemesia, nineteen at the time, claimed that Florentine artist Agostino Tassi cornered her in her bedroom and raped her. Afterwards, he told her that he would marry her; this promise gained him access to her bedroom time and time again, but he never fulfilled his promise. He claimed that he she was a whore and insisted that he never had sexual relations with her.

He was convicted and jailed for a year.

When the trial (whose transcripts still exist!) ended, Gentileschi afterward soon started work on one of her masterpieces. Judith Slaying Holofernes. While working on the painting, Gentileschi married another Florentine artist and moved to Florence and had a daughter; she began work on another painting of Judith after the first was finished.

The first Judith painting shows the Jewish widow Judith in the tent of the Assyrian general Holofernes, whose army had besieged Judith's town of Bethulia. In the tent, she captivates the general with her beauty, makes sure he is good and drunk and passed out, and then, along with her maid, decapitates him! She took his head back into town. Upon seeing it, the inspired townspeople revolted against and defeated the leaderless Assyrians. Judith, hence, served as a symbol of fighting oppression. One can't help but see Judith as a stand-in for the artist herself, standing up to (and defeating) her male oppressors.

Caravaggio painted the same subject, with the same title, in 1598-99. Like Gentileschi, he chose to portray the actual moment, the act, of the murder.

To see the Gentileschi, you gotta go to the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples.

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My 500 Greatest Performances of All Time pick for today?